Thursday, February 11, 2016

Concentration camp survivors voiced indignation on Wednesday at an Austrian prosecutor's statement that it was justifiable for a far-right magazine to call people who were liberated from the Nazi camp at Mauthausen a criminal "plague."

An article in the July/August edition of Die Aula said that description applied to a significant number of freed inmates, saying they committed a range of crimes nearby after Nazi guards fled at the end of World War Two.

"The fact that a non-negligible portion of freed prisoners became a plague on people is deemed by the judiciary to have been proven and is only disputed today by concentration camp fetishists," Die Aula's article said.

Prosecutors in the southern city of Graz initiated criminal proceedings against the author on accusations of Holocaust denial and inciting hatred, but later dropped the case.

"It is plausible that the release of several thousand people from the Mauthausen concentration camp presented a burden for the affected areas of Austria," the prosecutors' office said in an explanation of its decision signed by one official and made public by a parliamentary procedure last month.

"It cannot be ruled out that, in the context of the liberation, criminal activities ... were engaged in by those freed," it added. "Criminals were (indisputedly) among those imprisoned."